[gjsman-1000]

Let's not expand the term open source to automatically mean community driven development or free software. Neither need apply for a project to be open source.

> its existence is to serve Google's whims

Ah, yeah... the existence of every major project is to satisfy the companies paying for the development. Linux has been over 80% corporate commits every year since 2003. Blender is funded by 35 corporations. Not one open source project larger than a library has gotten anywhere major without corporate sponsorship.

[crapple8430]

I do think that Android is bad-faith open source too, but not in that sense. It's bad faith open source because only AOSP is actually open source, and AOSP by itself is not that useful of an operating system. There are a lot of proprietary components required for a functioning Android phone, usually known as Google apps, which are not open source. Android as a system is better described as open core, not open source. There are even mechanisms to prevent you from using your own fork, such as the various "integrity" APIs.

[DannyBee]

" It's bad faith open source because only AOSP is actually open source, and AOSP by itself is not that useful of an operating system. "

So it's bad faith because they didn't open source as much as you wanted, and you want parts that aren't open source because you don't find it useful enough.

Have you considered that maybe this is not a great bar?

Your claim of bad faith is based on what you want, and not based on how any of the people involved actually operated.

Perhaps you should not claim bad faith without evidence the people involved actually operated in bad faith.

Thankless people for whom somebody's particular open source project is not enough and feel like they are entitled to more are one of the worst things about open source as an ecosystem overall.

On top of that, i'm very curious to understand what exactly you think would be the state of the world had AOSP not been released.

(Also, as an aside, open core did not exist at the time AOSP was released)

[SuperNinKenDo]

I mean, parent does point out that we have another term that's probably less misleading (open-core), and there does have to be _some_ point at which a project can no longer call itself Open-Source and be taken seriously or in good faith. If a project Open-Sources one 20-line header file in a 6M LOC project, calling it Open-Source would be a straight up lie.

I think something like "Is it actually reasonably possible to build something usable from the parts that are Open-Source?" Is not a bad line in the sand, though it's not a very clean one.

You can quibble about it generally, or talk about case-by-case specifics, but your outrage seems a bit out of proportion, it's a reasonable position to take.

[DannyBee]

Here, they open sourced an entire buildable phone OS that you could build and flash on a phone and have it work.

At a time when none really existed. Not even close.

They also went out of their way to generate open drivers and rewrite those where vendors would not give them some, and ensure they had contracts that let them do so.

Calling this open core is also insane even if it wasn't a retcon. At the time, >95% of all android code in existence was open source. Probably closer to 99%. The remaining pieces were mostly related to prototype phones that never saw the light of day.

How is it possibly "less misleading" to call this release "open core"?

How it is a reasonable position to literally accuse them of bad faith because the parent didn't think it "useful enough"?

Admittedly I think open core is just a definition someone made up to beat others over the head with for "not being open source enough", so I wouldn't use it anyway[1].

But here, moving the goal posts because it didn't include whatever particular piece the parent wants does not make it a reasonable position, and it definitely is not a reasonable one. Nor is the completely unsubstantiated bad faith accusation.

My outrage is because i tire of watching people tear down things and literally accuse folks of bad faith because, 20 years later, they decided it wasn't good enough for them. The fact that this doesn't outrage more people says a lot more about how the open source community behaves than it does about android.

If this is the bar for reasonable positions, it's a really crappy bar.

[1] FWIW - while i was not always, i'm fairly consistent these days in believing that all the forms of trying to shit on open source releases or come up with no-true-scotsman terms to use for not being "something" enough are a plague, regardless of whether that something "accepting features that i want" or "releasing pieces that i want" or whatever. The sense of entitlement involved is often impressive. Was it released under an open source license? Cool it's open source. Period. I'll just be thankful someone took the time to share and use what ever they did share to build cool things. They don't owe me crap.

[ChadNauseam]

The integrity APIs are horrible. Why can you not send RCS messages from a rooted phone or use the ChatGPT app?

[charcircuit]

>and AOSP by itself is not that useful of an operating system

Why not? What useful feature is gated behind a proprietary API. Casting is one I can think of. But I think you can still get plenty of use out of a phone without casting.

There is technically a casting API in AOSP but it's old and doesn't integrate with Chromecast as well.

[bitsandboots]

I'd love to expand the term actually, because it's been misused to come to mean that something is community oriented, collaborative, even benevolent. Not even open source, but just the word "open". OpenAI for one. It's been abused for public image.

You're example of Linux is a bad one. Its contributions are corporate, but they are collaborative. With Android, Google dictates and others follow. Linux is not this way.

[gjsman-1000]

I don't really buy that.

Samsung tears most of the UI layer off Android and installs their own look and feel. Google does the same with Pixel, Huawei does with their phones, and so on. You have to follow some of Google's rules to get Play Services, but Android varies immensely depending on vendor. Ditto for things like background tasks and battery life management.

The same applies to Linux. The kernel changes significantly on vendor as well, with changes making it upstream only if the famously tribal Linux maintainers find it interesting. I am sure that the same applies for code from Samsung or Qualcomm to the Android codebase.

[NotPractical]

Those are very minor changes and almost everything besides superfluous things like the UI design are the same.

[bayindirh]

> Not one open source project larger than a library has gotten anywhere major without corporate sponsorship.

Let's think on this statement a little. From top of my head:

    - VLC
    - Darktable
    - rsync
    - KDE as in the Desktop Environment
    - Clementine Music Player
    - MusicBrainz Picard
    - GIMP
    - Zotero
    - GNU Octave
    - Kid3
    - KMail
    - etc, etc...

[izacus]

Those projects all heavily rely on libraries developed via corporate paycheck.

[bayindirh]

Let's not move the goalposts. The original claim was "if there's no corporate sponsorship, you can't have apps".

These apps are not sponsored by corporations directly.

Also, your point is untenable. The moment someone patches something while being employed by a company, that thing becomes "developed via corporate paycheck". This also makes the small tools developed by oneself "developed via corporate paycheck", because while the person was at home, and it was 2AM, They also had a job paying their bills somehow.

[NegativeLatency]

> Linux has been over 80% corporate commits every year since 2003

There's a big difference between all/most of the interest coming from a large company, compared to the numerous organizations that work together to make Linux what it is.

[dingnuts]

> Not one open source project larger than a library has gotten anywhere major without corporate sponsorship.

Bold statement. Who is the corporate sponsor of Emacs?

[NotPractical]

They weren't expanding any terms in the parent comment. "Android" (AOSP) is open source, but it's not good-faith open source.